OUR NATURAL WORLD OF OREGON'S COAST

 

Views and News of the Oregon Coast's 

Natural World

A service from Wallace Kaufman

EYES IN THE SKIES

(NOTE: This is the first of a developing news service blog about the natural world of the Oregon coast, particularly Lincoln County. Instead of cute comic captions, that make animals the butt of human jokes, I will try to encapsulate useful and important facts that allow us to understand our fellow animals how differently they experience the world and time. As the blog develops, I hope to have photos and notes by some of our excellent wildlife and landscape photographers and naturalists.)

Ospreys hunt over ocean waves, estuaries, rivers, and lakes around the world.

Look carefully along any waterway on the Oregon coast and you will see an osprey nest of sticks and lichens on top of a power pole, in the branches of a dead tree, on top of a pole of floodlights, or on a platform constructed by a power company to lure them away from live wires and transformers.

The osprey eye sees about twice as sharply as the human eye, but instead of being globular like ours, it is more tube shaped, like a telephoto lens, and that's how it functions. Its field of view, also like a telephoto lens, is much narrower than ours. Most of their prey are fish that swim in the top of the water column, but at very low tides I have seen them with flounders.

Like most raptors ospreys have binocular forward looking vision

The adult osprey's eyes are yellow. The chicks are born with black eyes that turn to amber or orange by the time they can fly. These Ospreys from Lincoln County will soon be flying south for winter. 

Along the Yaquina estuary an osprey rests above its newly constructed nest

For many years a pair of ospreys built a large nest on the cross bars of the power pole, a high risk home. Each winter Lincoln County Public Utility District (the PUD) had to take it down. A few years ago the PUD erected a pole and platform and perch just for the ospreys. They have built on this platform for the past 4 years.